This is from from the young poet in Kierkegaard's (well, Constantin Constantius') Repetition (205), which I have just reread without the exalted repetition-experience its aesthetic author rhapsodizes about:
Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward. Repetition, therefore, if it is possible, makes a person happy, whereas recollection makes him unhappy.... Repetition’s love is in truth the only happy love. Like recollection’s love, it does not have the restlessness of hope, the uneasy adventurousness of discovery, but neither does it have the sadness of recollection—it has the blissful security of the moment.... Hope is a lovely maiden who slips away between one’s fingers; recollection is a beautiful old woman with whom one is never satisfied at the moment; repetition is a beloved wife of whom one never wearies, for one becomes weary only of what is new. (131-32)
But of course, in the paradoxical way we expect from Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works, Constantius is an inveterate bachelor. His own attempt to test repetition (repeating a trip to Berlin) fails. And the young poet - who seems to need periodically to express himself to the older Constantius but does so in
letters without a return address, so the "observer" cannot respond - relives Job's passion (My whole being screams in self-contradiction. How did it happen that I became guilty? Or am I not guilty? ... Even if the whole world rose up against me, even if all the scholastics argued with me, even if it were a matter of life and death - I am still in the right. No one shall take that away from me, even if there is no language in which I can say it. (200-201) and then floats away in rapture fit to be a husband (214).Constantius lets on that he's invented the young poet, but of course he is himself the invention of Kierkegaard, who was at that point (1843) the age of the young poet. "Constantius" concludes Repetition with a letter to the reader which explains what he's been up in the book:
On the one side stands the exception, on the other the universal, and the struggle itself is a strange conflict over the rage and impatience of the universal over the the disturbance the exception causes and its infatuated partiality for the exception, for after all is said and done, just as heaven rejoices more over a sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous, so does the universal rejoice over the exception. ... The whole thing is a wrestling match in which the universal breaks with the exception, wrestles with him in conflict, and strengthens him through this wrestling.... There are exceptions. If they cannot be explained, then the universal cannot be explained, either. Generally, the difficulty is not noticed because one thinks the universal without passion but with a comfortable superficiality. The exception, however, thinks the universal with intense passion. (226-27)
What all is going on here? That there's Joban drama I get. But all of this is also about Kierkegaard's breaking of his engagement with Regine Olsen (to achieve a fidelity to marriage greater than can be achieved in an actual marriage - or something like that!), and about his problems with Hegel. And Christianity... It's thrillingly confounding.
